I often wonder what my mother, who died in 2002, would have made of Syria today: the bloodshed, the butchery, the brutality of Bashar Assad's regime depicted in grainy cell-phone videos on YouTube. A country torn at the seams.
For a while, Syria belonged to my mother, Farida Kuligowska, who studied at Damascus University in the 1970s and later returned as a journalist in the early '80s. She was shy, flaxen-haired and fluent in Arabic.cheapjackets
I like to think she would have seen through Bashar Assad long before these dark days, and balked at his pretense of being a reformer. She certainly had her doubts about Hafez, Bashar's father, even at a time when he was America's darling. After the 1973 war, Henry Kissinger visited Assad Sr. 13 times, believing that the cunning peasant-leader could be the most trusted Arab partner of the U.S.
The other day, on the anniversary of my mother's passing, I was rummaging through a box brimming with tourist knick-knacks and my mother's photos of people in flared jeans and sequined jackets, when I found a bulky book of newspaper clippings from her time in the Middle East. Stuffed between the yellowed pages were her student letters to her anxious father in Warsaw, scribbled notes for a book, and the articles she wrote later as a roving reporter in and around Syria for Polityka, a Polish weekly.shoppingbagfactory
The letters set her father's mind to rest—there was a war brewing, after all. But they also paint a vivid picture of Hafez's Damascus. My mother lived close to what the locals called Hanging Square, the place that had until recently been used to string up supposed traitors and spies. The rents were cheaper there, but even so, Polish students had to share cramped digs to make ends meet. Soldiers in khaki were everywhere, a reminder that before Hafez, Syria had witnessed coup after coup.
In the months after the 1973 war, Damascus was a dark place. The Israelis had hit the main power plant, so all of the lights were kept dimmed. My mother reported that faces would emerge out of the evening gloom as a painterly chiaroscuro. Unlike the bustling capitals of Cairo and Beirut, the streets would empty of cars by 9 p.m.
Yet Hafez Assad's Damascus retained a sheen of glamour, and enough metropolitan flair to make outsiders believe that Assad was on the way toward making his people richer and happier.monclerjacketswomens My mother wrote home about the fashionable boutiques on Kasar Street,laurenhoody well beyond her shoestring budget. She longed to hang out in the Piccadilly, the place to see and be seen. It had been renamed Cordoba due to a ban on English names, and the city's murals depicting 18th-century London had been plastered over on the orders of a Baathist official, but it retained its allure as a society hangout.
All of this was part of Hafez Assad's confidence trickery, the illusion that Baathist dictatorship could have a smiling, youthful face. His 1973 constitution, for instance, guaranteed women's "equal status in society." Assad boosted investment in infrastructure, the health sector and education. My mother's dissertation analyzed these education reforms and was broadly supportive,energysaving but soon enough she was no longer giving Assad the benefit of doubt.
For a while, Syria belonged to my mother, Farida Kuligowska, who studied at Damascus University in the 1970s and later returned as a journalist in the early '80s. She was shy, flaxen-haired and fluent in Arabic.cheapjackets
I like to think she would have seen through Bashar Assad long before these dark days, and balked at his pretense of being a reformer. She certainly had her doubts about Hafez, Bashar's father, even at a time when he was America's darling. After the 1973 war, Henry Kissinger visited Assad Sr. 13 times, believing that the cunning peasant-leader could be the most trusted Arab partner of the U.S.
The other day, on the anniversary of my mother's passing, I was rummaging through a box brimming with tourist knick-knacks and my mother's photos of people in flared jeans and sequined jackets, when I found a bulky book of newspaper clippings from her time in the Middle East. Stuffed between the yellowed pages were her student letters to her anxious father in Warsaw, scribbled notes for a book, and the articles she wrote later as a roving reporter in and around Syria for Polityka, a Polish weekly.shoppingbagfactory
The letters set her father's mind to rest—there was a war brewing, after all. But they also paint a vivid picture of Hafez's Damascus. My mother lived close to what the locals called Hanging Square, the place that had until recently been used to string up supposed traitors and spies. The rents were cheaper there, but even so, Polish students had to share cramped digs to make ends meet. Soldiers in khaki were everywhere, a reminder that before Hafez, Syria had witnessed coup after coup.
In the months after the 1973 war, Damascus was a dark place. The Israelis had hit the main power plant, so all of the lights were kept dimmed. My mother reported that faces would emerge out of the evening gloom as a painterly chiaroscuro. Unlike the bustling capitals of Cairo and Beirut, the streets would empty of cars by 9 p.m.
Yet Hafez Assad's Damascus retained a sheen of glamour, and enough metropolitan flair to make outsiders believe that Assad was on the way toward making his people richer and happier.monclerjacketswomens My mother wrote home about the fashionable boutiques on Kasar Street,laurenhoody well beyond her shoestring budget. She longed to hang out in the Piccadilly, the place to see and be seen. It had been renamed Cordoba due to a ban on English names, and the city's murals depicting 18th-century London had been plastered over on the orders of a Baathist official, but it retained its allure as a society hangout.
All of this was part of Hafez Assad's confidence trickery, the illusion that Baathist dictatorship could have a smiling, youthful face. His 1973 constitution, for instance, guaranteed women's "equal status in society." Assad boosted investment in infrastructure, the health sector and education. My mother's dissertation analyzed these education reforms and was broadly supportive,energysaving but soon enough she was no longer giving Assad the benefit of doubt.
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